


Lacuna

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curses, M/M, Post-Season/Series 13, Pre-Slash (ish), a day in the life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 00:53:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14153115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: A good day.





	Lacuna

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to [WetSammyWInchester](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WetSammyWinchester/pseuds/WetSammyWinchester) for looking over this.

The bathroom, it turns out, is at the end of a void of corridors, behind the clanging kitchen. By the time Sam treks all the way back a waitress has approached their table, and he pauses at the threshold to the dining room, ducks behind the corner as Dean lifts his eyes from his menu, flash of panic in his face.

There’s the murmur of question and response and Sam strains his ears.

“This,” he hears Dean say, cautious.

“I’m sorry honey, I don’t have my glasses,” she says, and Sam closes his eyes, tries to lock down the laugh building in his chest. “Can you just tell me?”

“Right, sure,” Dean says, thick with reluctance. “Ah. Then I’d like. Ah, the soup.”

Good lord, _soup_. Sam bites his lip and steps around the corner, sees his brother staring up at the waitress, appalled.

“Special today is corn chowder,” she’s saying as Sam slides into the booth. She contorts to look back through the service window and emits an impressive bellow. “Hey, LEM! We got any chowder left?”

“CHOWDER’S OFF!” zings back through to the dining room. 

“I think they’re out of chowder, Dean,” Sam says, deadpan, and Dean kicks him, hard, under the table.

“Sorry honey,” she says. Her name, apparently, is Rose, and she’s grandma-age in a canary-yellow dress, and the upshot of that is that Dean won’t be rude to her, which as far as Sam is concerned is a dream come true. She taps her pen on her pad. “Anything else catch your fancy?”

Dean widens his eyes at Sam, mouth a desperate line. Sam grins at him unabashed. 

“Salad,” Dean croaks. “No, sorry, I mean your.” A muscle ticks in his jaw. “I mean...your biggest salad.”

“Salad, large,” she repeats, writing, and switches over to Sam. 

“Burger and fries for me,” Sam says, as sincerely as he can, earning himself another kick. “And some more coffee, thanks.”

“You got it.” She bustles away. 

“That hurt,” Sam says, bending down to rub his shin. Dean had managed to get his bad leg both times and his knee throbs, sprained last night during the chase. “Maybe I won’t swap with you after all.”

“Where the hell _were_ you?”

“You have to walk a labyrinth to get to the bathroom in this place. I think I saw a minotaur in there.”

“I’m so interested in your excuses,” Dean hisses, leaning over the table. Sam grins at him again and his scowl deepens. “You know what, when we get out of here I’m gonna--” His face turns red with effort. “Caress, _fuck_.”

His jaw snaps closed and Sam cracks up, helpless. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“I’m just so thrilled. With this whole situation, Sam. It’s been a real.” He grits his teeth. “ _Delight._ ”

“Hey, I told you not to go poking around.”

“Hooray for you,” Dean says, caustic, drawing it out. He slumps in his seat and digs moodily at the tabletop with his fork, screeching scraping noise until Sam snatches it out of his hand. 

“You wanna test it again?” Sam says. “Maybe it’s getting better.”

He looks up and nods in a rather hopeless way. “No.”

Sam waves the fork in the air. “Okay. What’s this?”

“A balloon. Shit.” Dean frowns at it and licks his lips, breathes deep. “ _Physical Graffiti_. Mary Todd Lincoln.” Sam snorts, mouths _what_? and Dean widens his eyes, baffled. 

Sam mirrors him, equally lost. “Don’t look at me, man, it’s your brain. I think it gets worse when you try to force it.”

“What the hell?”

“I’m just shocked you know Mary Todd Lincoln.” Sam waggles the fork again, angles the reflected light into Dean’s eyes and snickers as Dean wrinkles his nose, waves his hand like it’s a fly he can shoo. “Come on. What colour is it?” 

Dean grits his teeth and refocuses, tension in his cheeks: his battle face, here in a cheap and sunny smalltown diner, glaring at a stick of cutlery like it just killed his dog. It’s almost too much for Sam to bear.

“Okay,” Dean mutters, “colour, all right. It’s green. Red! _Fuck_. Damn it. God _damn_ it, Sam,” he wails, deeply aggrieved, and Sam slaps the table and cackles, points at his pout and laughs so hard it leaves him wheezing. “Don’t laugh, asshole. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Sam leans back into his seat, curls an arm around his belly and gasps, swipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Oh, man, your face. You gottta shut up for a while, I can’t take it.”

Dean tilts his head. His eyes soften. His mouth twitches. 

“I,” he says, and cuts himself off. “You...” He sighs and gives up. “I hate you.”

“You want the food to go?” Sam’s cheeks hurt but he can’t stop smiling. He twirls the fork through his fingers and raises an eyebrow. 

“Yeah,” Dean says, defeated, corner of his mouth curled upwards. “To go would be great.”

Sam grins wider and settles into the booth, stretches his arm across the back of his seat and looks out the window at the noontime sun, and under the table Dean kicks him again, half-hearted, a comfortable petulant nudge.

Good feeling bubbles in his veins, hums under his skin. Not a bad day, today. So far. Not at all. Four hours on the road this morning listening to Dean tie himself up in knots. A clear easy back-roads run through quiet country. A destination, the bunker, and when he opens the door it’ll be his, and familiar sights will welcome him. Whiskey; a graffitied table.

Late tonight if they push it or if Dean lets him drive; maybe tomorrow morning if they feel like dropping cash on a room. They’re somewhere west of Pittsburgh. The diner’s on the edge of town and town’s on higher ground, the falling roll of field and creek outside their window. The sky an emphatic blue. Towering pure cumulus with dark hungry shadows. He tracks their glide down slopes, swallowing houses and barns and roads and stands of elder and ash whole before releasing them back into the day.

“You sure that minotaur wasn’t in the mirror?” Dean says, sly, after a few minutes, and Sam goes _har har_ and scrubs at his stubble, looks over at him. Like Dean had followed him in there. Sam had washed his hands and stared at himself a while, unshaven with bags under his eyes and the shape of his life etching into his face.

Dean shifts in his seat, bends close to the window to check on the Impala, parked on the far edge of the lot.

“So,” he says. “Am I gonna be cursed forever?”

“Depends. Are you gonna be nice to me?” Dean shoots him a bitchy look and Sam quirks his lips, itches the bridge of his nose and shrugs. “Shouldn’t be too hard, once we get back.”

“Why is it always me?” Dean grumbles.

“Because you always go sticking your nose where you’re not supposed to.”

“No I don’t!”

“Ah, from the horse’s mouth,” Sam says, satisfied, and bats away a thrown sugar packet. “Hell, Dean, you got off easy this time. Most of those objects were killing magic. A lie curse is nothing in the scheme of things.”

It was an interesting one, he’d give her that. And pretty literal. Seemed to only affect to falsifiable statements and the answers to questions. And it had been a pretty straightforward fight, too, once they’d tracked the deaths and malaise back to her shop; but that was the thing about witches. They always managed to blow you a kiss on the way out the door.

She’d put so much of herself into her work. Sam had shot her, and every item in that cabinet had turned to ash. So much of herself devoted to suffering. They’d pinned five deaths to her name, but who knew how many people she’d messed with before they came along. 

They really had gotten lucky, Sam thinks, allowing himself to imagine it for the first time: Dean picking up, idle and careless, something from the shelf above or below. Lucky is barely even the word for it. There’s no pain here, no fresh open wounds; only a minor violation. Sam gets to keep his brother another day.

Their plates land in front of them. He runs his hand through his hair and summons a smile for the waitress, looks up and it’s a different woman, pretty and blonde. She blinks at him and smiles back, interest sparking up, and he spares an idle half-second on what it might be like to make a move, or let her make one. Keep the good day going, keep that laughing feeling. 

“Thanks,” he says, and she says _uh huh_ , kind of uncertain, pink in her cheeks and a shine in her eyes and god, she’s young. In years and in the rest of it. He clears his throat. “Ah, could we get that coffee too?”

“Coffee,” she repeats, and it takes her a moment, but her smile shifts tracks into standard waitress friendliness. She nods. “Coming right up.”

He looks over the table. Dean has been watching them, neutral, maybe a little amused. 

“Hey,” he says, and nudges Dean with his toe, even though he has Dean’s full attention already. “Wanna swap?”

Dean looks down at the mountain of greenery in front of him and back up. 

“Not on your life,” he says, and stretches out an eager hand.

::

They emerge into a cloud shadow, walk along the ground with it until they wash up at the car and it skates blithely away without them. The sun knocks Sam sideways; the door handle burns, and it’s even worse inside.

Dean seems happier now he’s full of grease and carbs, Zeppelin in the deck, and he points them due west, stabs at the aircon and settles into his groove. How he doesn’t fall asleep on these overwarm after-lunch drives Sam will never know. 

Summer in Ohio. Sweltering, heat sunk between the hills, trapped under the trees. The car shifts in its line a fraction and he looks to see Dean steering with his knees as he works his way out of his flannel, tosses it over his shoulder. The smell of his sweat and cologne bounces pleasingly around the interior. 

Sam sheds his own shirt, plucks at the chest of his v-neck to get some air against his skin. Leans his forehead on the window, closes his eyes, and lets himself bake. Like if he stays here long enough he can pull the sun inside, let it warm every part of him. 

Maybe he spends too much time underground.

Dean clears his throat.

“So I think your face gave that waitress nightmares.”

Sam snorts. “You sure that wasn’t from the way you were eating?”

“I’m a growing boy,” Dean smirks, patting his stomach, and Sam laughs, looking at him, his crow’s feet, the way his shoulders have settled, his jaw. Sam has seen grey in his hair, more than a few strands, behind his ears, above his temples: places where he can’t find them to pull them out. Sam’s been waiting for the right time to spring that particular revelation.

“You wish,” is all he says, and Dean twists his mouth, wry.

“Yeah.”

Sam taps his knuckles on the window absently. “This is almost like a normal conversation.”

Dean’s face falls back into complaining mode. “Where the hell is Cas when you need him?”

“Come on, we’re not gonna call him across the universe for this,” Sam says. “I can think of three books in our library that can break it off the top of my head. You’ll be sorted five minutes after we get home.”

Dean opens his mouth, injured; shuts it and pats the dash a couple of times.

“Our other home, I mean,” Sam says, feeling obscurely sorry. He runs his fingers across the vinyl seat, the pebbled stitching, and feels the satisfied glow of Dean’s approval. “So how come you picked up that object? Out of all of them?”

“It sounded like a dream,” Dean says, and makes a _what the fuck_ face and tries again. “There was a monkey on it.”

“Nonsense.” Sam shakes his head. “Even for you.”

Dean sends him a death glare. “I hate you.”

“Hey, I’m an innocent bystander here.”

Dean gets a determined look, waves his hand in encouragement. “Come on, I’m useless.”

Sam sucks his cheek between his teeth and bites down until he’s sure he can control himself, fingers pinching his lips shut. He works to keep his voice even. “Okay. Were there words on it?”

“Yes.”

“Symbols, then?”

“Yes.”

Sam scratches his forehead with this thumbnail and tries to picture the cabinet. He’d only glanced at it for a second. “Was it because….did you sense some kind of power in it?”

“Yeah, Sam.” Dean rolls his eyes. “That’s my role in this whole shebang we got going here, I walk around _sensing magic_.”

“I mean.” Sam shrugs. “Okay, so there wasn’t a monkey on it. Was there some kind of animal on it?”

Dean is silent a moment. 

“Yes,” he says, evenly. _You’re an idiot_ resounds underneath loud and clear. “I picked it up because there was some kind of animal on it, because I’m a little girl.”

“Was it a pony?” Sam grins, and Dean purses his lips. “A little kitty?”

“You’re a nightmare.”

Sam snickers. “Was it shiny?”

“Yes.” Dean shoots him a dirty look and Sam runs the conversation over in his head.

“Did it sound like something – did it make a noise?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, did it _look_ like something?”

Dean sits up straighter. “No.”

“Like what?”

“A star. Brazil. A beach. A toe. A--”

“Stop! Listing nouns. Let me think.” Sam frowns out the windshield. It’s odd, this circling around the truth, a hollow at the centre of Dean’s words. Like listening for silence. “Okay, so was it an actual thing? Or a representation?”

“An actual thing.”

“Like a carving?”

“No.”

“Was it life size?”

Dean opens his mouth, pauses, and shuts it; narrows his eyes at Sam and smirks.

Sam puts his face in his hands. Hears Dean chuckle.

“Dean,” he groans. “Did you pick up a cursed object because it looked like a dick?”

Dean’s smile gets real smug. “No,” he says.

“Like a moth to a flame,” Sam says, shaking his head, despairing. Dean looks entirely too impressed with himself. “So is that something you do a lot? Go around touching strange dicks?”

Dean shoots him an alarmed glance and his lips part, shaping the word _yes_ before he clacks his jaw closed. Sam grins at him victorious and lets him stew.

They’re in corn country now, wide flat sunbaked acres and the shimmer and rustle of insects. Catch up to a truck that’s doing the crime of 60 and Dean glides around it like they’re in water, guns forward.

Summer in Indiana. They break to piss, stretch their legs. 

Sam’s got a Raymond Chandler he could be reading, in the backseat, under his shirt. In the footwell, taking up space his right heel wants to be in, are a thousand dense and dry pages on the layered planes of Hell and Purgatory, eighty years old, authored by some anonymous Man of Letters. That’s what he _should_ be reading. A line of research he’s been running in his spare time for months now, carving an hour out here and there. Something more pressing always comes up.

Summer in Illinois. Sam sweats through it all. Folds his arms and wedges himself into a semi-comfortable configuration and dozes, for about an hour. Opens his eyes and watches the sun beat them to the horizon. 

Summer in Missouri. 

Dean turns on the high beams with a familiar _snick_ and Sam doesn’t move, lets the engine buzz through him, lets his eyes fall out of focus. Spots of fuzzy light in the dark; the occasional rush of another car shifting by. At some point Dean had switched over to radio and Fleetwood Mac floats out, easy and soft.

He shouldn’t have shut his eyes. He’d dreamed, hazy and scattered, nothing clear but it’s left him with a drag in his chest. Weight and worry. This time tomorrow they’ll be back in the bunker and Dean will be back to normal and there’ll be something new to deal with and he’ll be five steps behind and getting further.

He sits up and stretches, tries to pop his back. Scrubs the crust from his eyes, blinks out the window as they sail through a fracture of buildings called a town and out the other side.

“You--” Dean starts, his voice gravelled with disuse, and shakes his head, like he can tell he’s going wrong. “I sang-- Oh, for-- This is awesome.”

“I will admit,” Sam says. “It’s a weird one.” His knee throbs, and he shifts to ease it, a hand underneath to support. Senses more than sees Dean cut him a glance. 

“There’s nothing,” Dean says, and sighs. “Whatever.”

Sam snorts. “Okay, I have an idea. Try it as a question.”

Dean sets his jaw, considering. “Do you think,” he says, carefully, distastefully, “there’s a bar around here?”

Sam’s lips twitch. “I think there might be,” he says. “You know, when you’ve been driving these roads as long as I have you start to get a sixth sense.” 

Dean rolls his eyes and cracks a yawn.

Sam looks at his watch. Eight and half hours since lunch, or thereabouts. Slid away right from under him, smooth as blacktop. 

Up ahead neon sets the trees aglow in orange and blue. 

“So,” Dean says. “You hungry? Want a drink?”

Phrased as a question, to be clear about his meaning. Maybe it’s a request. 

“Sure,” Sam says. “If you think you can handle it.”

Dean throws him a smirk and clicks the indicator on.

Sam laughs.

::

“I better order,” Dean murmurs, as they step up to the bar, and Sam nods and leans his back against it, hooks his heel on the footrail. The place is worn but clean, and busy-ish; there’s a game on, and an area down the back houses a bunch of local dudes and their intermittent screams. Kind of thing he usually hates but he’s feeling benevolent at the moment, like the sun came back to him; followed him in, found a vacant space under his skin.

“What can I getcha?”

Dean digs a sharp elbow into his side and Sam starts, turns around. “Sorry,” he says, and the dude behind the bar raises an expectant eyebrow, and Sam looks at his brother and grins. “What would you like, Dean?”

Dean narrows his eyes into daggers.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. “He’s taken a vow of silence.”

“Mhmm.” It’s a sound of supreme boredom. “Does he drink?”

“Only Bud Light,” Sam says, and laughs and staggers to the side as Dean socks him hard in the arm, and just for that he abandons Dean entirely, turns his back, hand raised in surrender. Settles into a booth on the far wall and rubs at his new bruise and watches Dean lay money down, hook his fingers around four bottles and amble over, packet of beer nuts hanging out of his mouth that he drops unceremoniously on the table when he arrives.

“Wings?” he says, sliding in, and Sam nods, unburdens him.

“Sure.”

Dean sucks down half his first bottle, looks directly at Sam, and burps, deep and artless. Sam wrinkles his nose. Dean grins in righteous justice.

“This has been really tough on you, hasn’t it?” 

“Well, you know,” Sam says, and rearranges himself so his back is against the wall. He props his bad leg up on the seat, stretches it out. “Usually these things are a little more--”

“Blood, screaming, lives ruined?”

“I’m just saying, all told?” He shrugs. “I think it counts as a win.”

Dean quirks his mouth and holds his bottle out. Sam clinks. 

“And if it benefits me in particular,” Sam says, looking over at the bar, “that’s gravy.” Dean bares his teeth and Sam chuckles and tips his bottle to his mouth, takes a long drink as Dean rips open the packet of nuts.

Hard to tell if he’s planning on pushing through the night and Sam doesn’t mind either way. Sprawled in yet another booth, a retread of how they were sitting 700 miles ago, and a thousand times and a million miles before that. Dean’s eyes rove slowly around the room but don’t settle on any one woman or pool table or TV. 

Three curse-breaking books minimum waiting for them, Sam had said in the car. It was a fair guess. He can picture two of them. One is collecting dust under a pile of other books on the sideboard in his room. He should have paid more attention. No, what he _should_ have done is bring it with him in the first place. No great stretch of imagination to think that curses might be involved in a witch hunt, and then Dean wouldn’t have had to go through this at all.

They’ll have all the ingredients, at least. It’s an odd curse but he hadn’t seen anything too out of the ordinary in her shop. Certainly nothing cosmic. He’ll fix it. He’s fixed worse. And he’d promised; looked Dean in the eye and told him he’d be okay, and felt Dean’s belief. No option, then, but to get it fixed. 

He’s been pretty good at keeping his promises lately. He’s learned to avoid making those that are outside his capacity to keep.

The human bustle around him is a quiet comfort and a quiet source of unease. A bar-cum-roadhouse in the middle of northern Missouri. Locals, repeat offenders, a ladies’ night out; a few lonesome truckers and journeymen fitting their elbows into the elbow grooves on the bar. Probably looks the same every night. Even in a pass-through place like this Sam and his brother are the only true strangers. Strangers just about everywhere.

He leans his head back against the wall. Looks at Dean out the corner of his eye. Maybe he ought to sort out a place to stay overnight. Give Dean a chance to test out his communication skills on someone who belongs.

“This joint just run out of servers?” Dean says, peeved tone, looking around, and Sam shrugs and takes a drink. “I’m a ballerina.”

Sam chokes, inhales half his beer into his lungs and coughs rest out his nose. 

“Oh, you fucker,” he gasps, and hacks another cough into his sleeve, eyes watering. He lifts his shirt and wipes his face. His nose stings. Half his goddamn beer is gone. “You did that on purpose.”

“Me?” Dean says, big innocent eyes, smile tucked into the corner of his mouth.

“Asshole,” Sam croaks, his nose still running. “What were you even trying to say?”

“Guess.”

“I wouldn’t dare try to trace the steps your thoughts take.”

“How _else_ \--”

“Well, you know questions are okay. And commands too, I think. No,” Sam warns, points his finger and glares down the spark in Dean’s eye. “Don’t even.”

“Put that thing away before you lose it,” Dean says, slapping Sam’s hand away, and beams at him, delighted.

“Or there’s the obvious solution,” he says, quick, before Dean can get started, and that distracts him well enough.

“Obvious solution?”

“Just shut up.”

Dean blinks at him a moment, nonplussed. A knowing grin slides across his face. “You think it’s gonna be that easy?”

Sam looks away and tries to hide his smile behind his bottle. “Guess it never has been.”

“Mhmm. What other ideas you got, genius?”

“Hell,” Sam says, and takes a drink, shrugs. “Why not embrace it? Maybe now’s the chance to bust out one of your old I’m a big-shot Hollywood producer lines. I couldn’t even judge you for lying.”

Dean scratches his stubble. “Yeah,” he says, musing tone, looking around. His eyes fall on the ladies’ night gang, clumped around a standing table by the bar, raucous laughter as they send an ambassador across for another jug. Sam lets him weigh his options; picks the label off his beer, dragging his thumbnail through soggy paper.

The wings arrive, finally, and a couple more bottles; they keep Dean at the table after all, and he doesn’t seem to take it as any big loss.

“I am a big-shot Hollywood producer, though,” he says, face-deep in barbeque sauce. “I coulda been.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Sam says, grave, screwing up his napkin and throwing it in the basket. “I look at you and the first thing I think is LA.”

“Thank you,” Dean says, arch.

Sam kicks him, and picks up a coaster. “Hey. You wanna test it again?”

Dean looks up in hope. “Do you think--” He pauses, narrowed gaze flicking between the coaster and Sam’s face. Suspicion blooms into outrage. “Are you _fucking_ with me?”

Sam huffs through his nose. “Don’t be paranoid. If I can extrapolate--”

Dean’s jaw drops and he hunches forward. “Extrapolate my ass,” he hisses. “You know, everyone thinks you’re the mean one.”

“Can’t fool you,” Sam grins, and Dean purses his lips and straightens, still glaring, raps his knuckles on the table, definitive and sure.

“Don’t you forget it.”

Sam can’t imagine a universe where he could. He finishes his drink, lays the bottle on the table and rolls it back and forth under his palm, clears his throat. “So what, are we driving tonight?”

“You don’t wanna sleep in the car?” It’s a tease, but Sam’s knee aches at the thought of it.

“Can you do another four hours?”

“Nah,” Dean says, lazy confident grin. Drains his beer and stands, looks down at Sam. “Wait here.”

Sam rolls his eyes. Watches him walk to the bathroom, giving the pool table and its players a professional once-over as he passes; Sam can tell just from the way he tilts his head that he’s wistful over the amount of money he could have taken off the rail. 

Could have been a death curse, he thinks again, out of nowhere, rattled sober; it should have been. Lucky, he got so lucky. Cracks in the ice but he didn’t fall through, today. Wasn’t pulled under.

Outside the humid air settles like a yoke across his shoulders, invades his lungs. Boots heavy on the trek over to where Dean stashed his baby in the dark. His hands feel kinda shaky and numb and he can’t close his fingers around the handle; turns instead, leans against the passenger door and breathes deep. Looks up through the ambient light and sees the stars straining to reach him. 

Crickets trill in stereo, sharp over the muted distant bar noise. 

Dean, halfway in the car, shuts his door with an ancient creak, comes back around and stops a few feet in front of Sam. Hands in his jeans pockets. Watchful, his shoulders an easy line and the moon soft on his face. Neon blue glint in his eyes. Alive. Sam looks at him and feels his own heart beating.

No, he thinks. It’s been a good day.

“You done having your moment?” Dean says, gently amused. Sam shakes his head.

“Just thinking how funny it is, watching you have to think about what comes out of your mouth.”

“I’m so pleased,” Dean starts, and stops, sucks at his teeth, frowning. “It’s not--”

“Like a snake trying to ride a bike.”

Dean grins at him. “You’re such an asshole.”

Sam raises an eyebrow, coy. “Thanks.”

“Evil incarnate.”

Sam grins so wide he thinks his jaw might crack. “You’re too kind.”

“And ugly.” Dean sidles in a step, lip curled in distaste. “A real horrorshow.”

Sam tips his head back and laughs, clean up at the sky, and when he looks down Dean is closer again, their boots not so far from knocking.

“You laugh too much,” Dean says, quiet, and nothing more. Keeps his gaze steady and Sam feels his smile sink off his face, drag down until his chest aches, tight pressure. He puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs, looks around the lot, squints against the lights on the other side. 

A long pause. Dean’s voice again.

“Are you happy?”

Sam breathes and meets his gaze, crooks a smile. “No.”

Dean’s eyes search his. Clear. “You’ve got no--” he says, and stops, an honest question. “Do you have any idea?” 

Sam swallows. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Dean nods to himself, thinking, gaze floating behind, to the car. Sam wonders if he’s got the back seat in mind and his knee gives a warning twinge. 

“You wanna go home?” he says instead, and Sam makes a considering face.

“You think I can get a cab to come all the way out here?” he says, and Dean rolls his eyes extravagantly, ducking his head as a smile breaks across his face, like he thinks he can hide in any way, in the dark, in himself, in any distance, from Sam.

“I hate you, you know,” he mutters, heading back around to the driver’s side.

“Yeah,” Sam says, turning to keep him in sight, and lets his grin out and his sun build back to brightness. “Right back atcha.”

::

The end.

**Author's Note:**

> feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
>  
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/172429536531/lacuna-4901-words-by-nigeltde-chapters-11)


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